The fact is that I personally like Construct. I find it easy, fast and quite filled with functionalities (shaders, lots of behaviors and so on).

I have also tested the other tools. I found them to be less intuitive than Construct ... Yet, the main issue for us is the stability of the final product.

We had some horrible experiences in the past with a game engine that had major issues regarding memory leaks, variables scope, Vista compatibility, loading times, hang-ups, screen freezes and even sprite visibility losses. We are now trying to avoid that kind of experience in our future projects.

All being said, I am interested to find out answers to these questions:

1. Does Construct have any memory leak issues?

2. The loading times of different levels are similar over time? (the same level loads in about the same time each time?)

3. In its current state, does Construct have any known game breaking bugs?

4. While checking the RTS behavior (of which I am very fond) I discovered that some of the sprites - when they reach the target destination - do not stop moving; instead, they start rotating around it at great speed. This is quite unacceptable if it happens on a public release. Are there any more of this type of bugs?

5. How fast bugs are solved? I have to ask this, as some game engines are updated quite fast, and others are updated once a year or even less. We cannot wait for an entire year for a minor bug fix.

6. In its current state, do you think that Construct is capable to create a commercial ready game? (multiple rooms, multiple levels, lots of sprites, sound, music, effects, multiple resolutions, many hours of game without crashes or glitches)?

As I said before, I personally think that Construct is the most intuitive and easy to use, but the other guys are really worried about stability.

The guys who made Torque 2D has announced going down so when using this engine is fine - don't expect any more updates or bugfixed at least not before some company will buy the game engine source and develop it further (which no one can promise you)

Multimedia Fusion 2 when being very advanced and developed, with solid user-base and support is very dated and it has "ways of doing things"(mechanics?) needlessly mixed in sometimes very user-unfriendly fashion.

Construct is a open source and freeware game engine being developed by just a few people - that's why don't expect any rapid development. It et better and better but the progress is very slow and some bugs are sometimes left unfixed for years (now, go on people troll me as much as you want but that's my opinion). Still thought, its quite simple to learn and you can make almost any game with Construct.

Game Maker has some very bothersome limitations, confusing mechanics and some hardcoded obstacles which you can't change without breaking the ToS. Still, it has huge user-base, lots of support quite quite wide possibilities

[quote:3iermld1]Does Construct have any memory leak issues[/quote:3iermld1]none that I can think of.

[quote:3iermld1]The loading times of different levels are similar over time? (the same level loads in about the same time each time?)[/quote:3iermld1]That's totally up to you - the GameDev. Layouts(maps?) in Construct can be huge, it deals quite well with big numbers of objects or particles. [quote:3iermld1]In its current state, does Construct have any known game breaking bugs?[/quote:3iermld1]You have to describe what exactly you believe to be game-breaking as it has MANY game-breaking issues for ME which most of other users label as "trivial".

[quote:3iermld1]5. How fast bugs are solved? I have to ask this, as some game engines are updated quite fast, and others are updated once a year or even less. We cannot wait for an entire year for a minor bug fix. [/quote:3iermld1]then with all due respect - I wouldn't chose Construct. As much sympathy as I have for Construct developers and understanding for their little team member work capabilities, facts are facts - the development of Construct is quite slow and some annoying issues,broken features or bugs might wait months to be fixed and patched. Months or more.

[quote:3iermld1]6. In its current state, do you think that Construct is capable to create a commercial ready game? (multiple rooms, multiple levels, lots of sprites, sound, music, effects, multiple resolutions, many hours of game without crashes or glitches)?[/quote:3iermld1]Commercial? No. Indie? Yes. The limits of the engine are mostly linked with end-user(the players) PC machine. For example, I can throw about 5000 x 64/64 pixels sprite objects into the layout and don't notice any slowdown. But the guy next door will have a delightful slide-show. The games made with Construct will be as good and as bug-free as you will program them. Look around, most of people here made or are in progress of making a game. Check their games and see yourself what Construct is capable of

[quote:3iermld1]As I said before, I personally think that Construct is the most intuitive and easy to use, but the other guys are really worried about stability. [/quote:3iermld1]I would be more worried about another thing. Construct at current state does not enables one to share his work. Technically. You can't "merge" cap files. Forget about 3 programmers working on different game aspect as all their work will be forced to be again imported into one cap file. In case of Construct there can be mostly just one programmer/coder. So yea the same guy who programmed the GUI, will also have to program the animation, system, mechanics, preferences, events and in general - put all the assets together. No work sharing.

Construct is FAR from being perfect. Its damn far from what I dream of. But the fact is - its probably the best 2D game authoring tool you can possibly find."In the land of the blinds, the cyclop is the king" I suppose.

[I can only imagine how much bashing ill receive for spreading the heresy that Construct is not perfect ]

all in one - if you don't have a good experienced programmer, go with Construct, its easily the best authoring program as for today. But if you do - now, that's another story

Last edited by irbis on Thu Apr 16, 2015 8:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Multimedia Fusion 2 seems very stable from when i have used it. It's not exactly un-friendly either but Construct improves on various things which MMF2 also does. For example in Construct it's much simpler and faster to make movements, MMF2 HWA also allows effects like Construct but Construct has nicer options for them, the event editor layout is nicer, the GUI looks nicer and has a better workflow.

As for bugs i have noticed a few already since i started using it. Things like crashes after reaching a certain particle amount (i think about 3500), the odd crash after previewing examples and lots of error messages when closing the app. Some things like the particle crash could easily be worked around by doing some testing and limiting the max amount.

I am guessing/hoping there will be updates in the future to give the program more stability though. I think the developers just don't have time right now from what i have read so things are a bit slow for updates.

[quote="zenox98":3n9miygd]Just an update to Irbis' point:Torque is now back up and running and have a special offer on at the moment. See [url:3n9miygd]http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/20775[/url:3n9miygd]

BTW, I am not affiliated with them whatsoever![/quote:3n9miygd]oh! thats interesting. Thank you for sharing Zenox

[quote:qlg2wfe2]As for bugs i have noticed a few already since i started using it. Things like crashes after reaching a certain particle amount (i think about 3500), the odd crash after previewing examples and lots of error messages when closing the app. Some things like the particle crash could easily be worked around by doing some testing and limiting the max amount.[/quote:qlg2wfe2]

This kind of illustrates a point I would make.

[quote:qlg2wfe2]4. While checking the RTS behavior (of which I am very fond) I discovered that some of the sprites - when they reach the target destination - do not stop moving; instead, they start rotating around it at great speed. This is quite unacceptable if it happens on a public release. Are there any more of this type of bugs? [/quote:qlg2wfe2]

The particles, and rts behaviors aren't exactly bugs. More like an unexpected behavior.The devs could change them for ease of use, but in doing so that might limit their use for someone else.

I just would like to add that mmf2 is really slow. The programmer i'm working with has been using mmf for a while, making a bunch of games... its code is really old (the core still uses 1/2 code from mmf and older stuff clikteam made). So, although it's stable, you won't be able to do everything with it (even with hwa, the same benchmark on construct and mmf is only slow with mmf using the same computer).